Interview 21409 – Caption Index: 670
As usual, right?… Read More
As usual, right?… Read More
And so AZA called us and asked us to rescue these animals. Well, I don’t know how to move animals from Africa to here. I have no clue. Read More
I have absolutely, how do you get three full grown adult elephants to Pittsburgh from Botswana?… Read More
I hadn’t a clue. So I called Holly Hunt, wonderful, wonderful person, great person, Holly Hunt, who is part of International Animal Exchange, who, in the old days would be called an animal dealer, animal mover, and a transport company. Read More
Well, I think that, in some cases, animal dealers get a bad rap. It’s like anything else, zoos included. There’s good zoos and there’s bad zoos. There’s good people and there’s bad people. There’s good insects and there’s bad insects. I mean, anything you name, there’s the good and bad… Read More
But in fact, the zoos, all of our zoos back in the day got animals, and we got animals through animal dealers. That’s how we got them. That’s how we got ’em into the states. And so when we looked to rescue three elephants outta Botswana, we were called by… Read More
The generator was $18,000. So if they had a power outage, they didn’t lose all the tissues, and their samples, and all of the things that they had in their labs there. We helped them build part of their laboratory there for their veterinarian work out of, and we built… Read More
What do you see as the cause of this change?… Read More
And how has the role of individual dealers and companies changed with respect to the development of modern zoos?… Read More
I think it’s still viable. I don’t think it’s gotten the marketing, or the PR, or the word of mouth that it needs to. And I think a lot of people may think that it requires millions of dollars, as opposed to smaller amounts of money are still helpful and… Read More
But we adopted that project, and support it, and we still support them. We supported them for 15 years, and sent staff over there, and work with them all the time. They come over to our place and give presentations, and educational programs and stuff about what they’re doing. They… Read More
Why have zoos not picked up on the challenge in more numbers?… Read More
Financial?… Read More
Is this kind of thing, adopting a national park, that’s still viable?… Read More
You might have an elephant there in the future, but you don’t now. And so that’s very hard. It would be hard for me to raise money for a facility in Florida that I have no ties to other than it’s the National Elephant Facility, for example. It would be… Read More
So sort of the original model was flawed, because there’re not enough elephants for the zoos that want elephants right now in their collection. And a lot of the elephants in captivity today, in our care, are older animals. So they’re not gonna be moving them around. And so there… Read More
We didn’t wanna do that. We didn’t wanna risk the move. We weren’t comfortable with that, that she would make it. That’s a long trip for anybody, much less an element, to drive. So I think that was really the key thing is that fundraising, having the control of the… Read More
I think people didn’t pick up on a national elephant program for the same reason that they’re leery of losing control of their species and their organizations. In other words, having a national elephant center means that people would have to support a facility that was not in their region. Read More
If you look at it purely from a fundraising standpoint, it’s difficult to raise money for a facility that’s not even near you, or you don’t even have an elephant there, right?… Read More
Space continues to be a problem for zoos and aquariums because more and more animals are becoming of concern, species of concern. So in the wild, we’re not doing a super job of protecting the animals in their native habitats. So we’re seeing more and more animals in need of… Read More